Our Drinking Choices

Growing up I was never near alcohol. Both my parents never drink, so to me, alcohol was always a bit of a mystery. But the reality is that México is a heavy drinking country and weddings are perfect opportunities to celebrate with some booze. Luckily Mr. Weather is a lot more knowledgeable when it comes to drinks, so when our wedding planning began, he took charge of this important task.

The great thing about Mexican weddings is that the couple gets to bring whatever alcohol they want. For example, we are bringing all our bottles to our caterer on the Wednesday before the big day. After double checking our supplies, the caterer will take charge of the drinks, and once the party is over they will return to us the unopened bottles, if any.

Usually the caterer or venue provides unlimited mixers, which in our case are:

Soft Drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, grapefruit soda, lemon soda

Sparkling water

Water

Cranberry juice

Pineapple juice

Ice

So now comes the hard part: how many bottles are needed for our guests? We looked for answers online. We used calculators from different pages, but the results where completely different from one another. For example, this calculator belongs to La Europea, a well known liquor store from Mexico. Understandably what they want is to sell, so their suggestions were scary! On the other hand, this one from Real Simple gave us more decent results, but the quantities didn’t apply to our guests’ tastes—what they drink more is rum and tequila and in that calculator they were barely considered. So in conclusion, the best thing to do is to know your guests!

So, what ultimately happened is that Mr. Weather’s friends helped! Most of them are already married so they know what drinks are more popular and how much of each is needed. I must say that they were also really nice, because they all helped Mr. W pay for most of the booze! Thanks, guys!

Here is our final list:

36 bottles of red wine: Mr. WV loves an Argentinian wine called Las Moras, a Malbec, so he chose that one.

25 bottles of Asti, sparkling Italian wine that we will use for toasts

I’m just sad that we couldn’t add some Baileys to the mix, but it was out of our budget. What we did add is a bottle of MoÃ«t Rosé Imperial for Mr. WV and me. If you haven’t tried it yet, do it when you get a chance—it is yummy!!

I just hope we have enough. How about you—what alcohol are you serving?

We’re in the middle of that now – also had to guesstimate since the US calculators don’t really apply to us either. My parents have been buying alcohol already – I think they’re going strong on the tequila/vodka =)